Global stock market valuation heat maps

Based on data provided by Aswath Damodaran, professor of Finance at NYU, Seeking Delta has created a series of global stock market valuation heat maps. As shown below, this is a very useful way of illustrating various stock market valuations and I am grateful to Seking Delta for granting Investment Postcards permission to publish the research.

The data are as of January 2011 and includes all publicly traded U.S. firms and all those with a market cap greater than $5 million for non-U.S. firms. Value Line is the source for U.S. data and a combination of Bloomberg and Capital IQ for non-U.S. data.

Countries where data were available for 30 or more firms were ranked by equally weighting Price/Earnings, Price/Book and Price/Sales ratios. More specifically, for those wonkishly inclined, the z-score for each metric was used in order to properly weight the possibility of a similar relative metric rank but a significant absolute difference. The color scale runs from dark green (cheapest) to dark red (most expensive).

According to this valuation method Japan and developed Europe appear to be the cheapest markets (no big surprise), with Asia and the big commodity players (Australia and Canada) being the most expensive. The U.S. comes out in about the middle; 36th out of 71 countries ranked. See map below.